The Xothic Legend Cycle

HERE is one of Lin Carter’s two verse apocalypses in the Cthulhu Mythos. The other, mentioned in "The Winfield Heritance", is "Visions from Yaddith", and you may look it up in an earlier volume in this series, The Shub-Niggurath Cycle. Come to think of it, we might count his "Limericks from Yuggoth" (see Black Forbidden Things, Borgo Press) as a third. Anyway, it is clear that Lin’s model in these poetic endeavors is Lovecraft’s sonnet cycle "Fungi from Yuggoth." The "Fungi from Yuggoth” represent almost a free-associating expansion of the Commonplace Book; in it HPL was free to develop individual items of mood, particular plot germs, etc. in their own right, without trying to work them into a connected narrative context (though, reading them in another way, each poem and several two- and three-sonnet sequences can be read as mini-narratives unto themselves). Lin Carter has done the same in "Dreams from R’lych.“

I have called "Dreams from R’lych" a Mythos apocalypse, or revelation. On one level, the reason for this label is obvious: The premise of the poems is that the Lord of R’lych sends dreams to communicate with certain sensitive individuals to make his will known and to signal his soon awakening. Beyond this I intend a comparison with the apocalypses of ancient Judaism and Christianity, including, among many others, the Revelation of John, the Book of Daniel, and Second Esdras. Apocalypses are composed in poetry, though this is not obvious to some readers, partly because of old Bible typography, in which the text is printed as a series of dense paragraphs, eliminating the poetic structure. Also, biblical poetry employed rhyme but seldom, utilizing instead various stylus of parallelism. Such poetry makes up the bulk of the Old Testament prophets, the Psalms (which were hymn lyrics), the Sung of Solomon (a bowdlerized Ishtar and Tammuz liturgy), the Book of Job, and most of the sayings attributed to Jesus.

Even the derivative character of "Dreams from R’lych" reinforces its identity as an apocalypse, rather than undermining it, since by far most of the ancient apocalypses were themselves reworkings of earlier examples of the genre, or of other biblical texts. The Revelation of John, for example, is heavily based on Daniel, Zechariah, and Ezekiel, to such an extent that one can scarcely appreciate Revelation without constant comparison with its biblical sources.

This point raises the question of the literary artificiality of a stylized "apocalypse" such as Lin Carter’s. The whole thing is quite evidently a studied literary performance, as were the ancient apocalypses. Though a modicum of debate still exists on the point (see Christopher Rowland, The Open Heaven), the evidence of conscious literary composition of the ancient apocalypses seems overwhelming to me. That is, "John" (with Beniamin W. Bacon, I do not exempt the Book of Revelation from the universal rule of pseudonymity in apocalypses) and the others did not simply transcribe their visions. They may possibly have begun with some sort of dream or visionary experience as their initial inspiration, but even this hardly seems likely, given the location of the apocalypse genre in the larger category of scribal Wisdom Literature, which implicitly makes them complex puzzles (see Revelation 13:18). Apocalypses are written as if they were telegrams from heaven, but this is just a convention of the genre. No one should take it seriously any more than they would the chance that songs in operas or Broadway musicals actually represent anyone’s mode of speech.

Yet the opposition "genuine vision" vs. "literary product" reveals itself as a false alternative when we view it from the aspect of the creative process, rather than that of genre mechanics. That is, who will deny that the poetic afflatus is itself a kind of inspiration bubbling up directly from the oracular brook of the artistic subconscious?

This is true equally of any sort of creative writing. There is another dimension of poetry in particular that seems to lend it a revelatory quality, and that is its unique diction. Cleanth Brooks condemned "the heresy of paraphrase" (The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry, chapter 11), the notion that a poem is merely one more vehicle for communicating ideas or information. Rather, “a poem should not mean, but be” (Archibald McLeish, “Art Poetica”). As Gerard Genette says, poetic diction’s unique feature and power is the "intransitivity" of its language (Fiction and Diction. p. 25), an only apparently referential character that is like the false depth in the flat picture plane of a painting. In poetry, therefore, it is the form which is the content. Thus a poem cannot be paraphrased.

As Nabokov says, the translator is the betrayer. This is why Muslims who call attention to the sublime poetic quality of the Qur’an also deny that any translation of the book can rightly be called the Qur’an at all. You can’t pour fine old wine into new skins. Somehow it is the old skins that made it fine wine! It is only because of the logocentric bias of traditional Western theology that no one seems to have realized that the Bible is "revelatory" not because of any special informational content it may contain, but because of its poetic character. It is only to be expected that dumbed-down paraphrases like the Living Bible or the New International Version or the New Revised Standard Version just plain stink. The fools who translated them and priced them at thirty pieces of silver destroyed the one thing that made the Bible worth reading in the first place.

Sadly, it is precisely this element of poetic diction, that which makes Lovecraft’s “Fungi from Yuggoth” a chilling revelation (just listen to the Fedogan & Bremer audiorape of it!), that seems to me utterly lacking in Lin Carter’s "Dreams from R’lyeh." Thus I think it really belongs here as one more (prose) story in the Xothic cycle, manifestly linked to the others by internal references. This one just happens to rhyme.

“Dreams from R’lyeh” appeared originally in the Arkahm House Lin Carter collection of that same title in 1975.